


True-ish American Values

by Ilthit



Category: Boston Legal
Genre: Alcohol, Drugs, Gen, M/M, Politics, What happened last night?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-05
Updated: 2019-10-05
Packaged: 2020-11-24 07:23:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20903846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ilthit/pseuds/Ilthit
Summary: Denny is definitely not going to go along with Shirley's idea of making him mayor.





	True-ish American Values

**Author's Note:**

  * For [asuralucier](https://archiveofourown.org/users/asuralucier/gifts).

“So you absolutely will not consider it?” 

Cigars and whiskey still happened every night, but on most evenings now their view wasn't the Boston skyline but a quiet little garden in the suburbs, kept handsome by an illegal gardener whom Denny underpaid and Alan overtipped. It was part of their agreement to take it easy now that Crane, Poole & Schmidt had essentially ceased to be. Besides, it just wasn't the same at the office without Shirley and the others. 

“Absolutely not. I've given a lot of thought to it, Alan, and I—I can't!”

“It's a hell of an opportunity. Not everyone gets handed a candidacy for mayor. It would be quite a feather in your cap." He paused and peered at his spouse across the wicker garden table, mismatched with the silver-embossed tray that bore a half-emptied bottle of something priced somewhere in the range of a small car. "If you are worried about the Mad Cow...”

“Mad Cow!” Denny scoffed. “Half the senate has Mad Cow. It's just that I'm Denny Crane. I want to continue to be Denny Crane! Not the first gay mayor of Boston.” He blew out a puff of air, not unlike the much-maligned cow. 

“Do I need to point out that you are not, in fact, gay?"

Denny waved his cigar, leaving a sinuous line of sparks in the semi-darkness under their dim porch lights. “Gay, bi, whatever you call it these days... It's all the same to them. I married you. If I become mayor, that's all I'll be. The truth doesn't matter, Alan, you know that.”

“I suppose I do.”

They smoked in silence for a while. 

“Shirley will be disappointed. She worked hard on that campaign. I think she was counting on having an ally of sorts in the post.”

“Shirley can shove it up her ass. She left us. Left _me_. For Carl Sack!”

“For a senate election campaign, actually.”

Denny made another of those noises and chugged back half a glass of whiskey. 

“I see,” said Alan, but kept his thought to himself. “I won't mention it again, Denny. I promise.” He reached a hand out over the wicker table and placed it on Denny's tight fist. After a moment, it relented. They wound their fingers together and listened to the night-time sounds of the family across the way carolling in October, and of a motorcycle revving past at high speeds. 

Perhaps he should have given Denny's original idea of a thousand acre ranch outside the city more thought. 

-

“Alan.” 

“Mmrhm.”

“Alan, wake up." There was a familiar hand on Alan's back, shaking him awake with that jerky, almost violent insistence Denny put into physical touch when he wasn't thinking. Alan buried deeper into the covers. He had a smudgy kind of a headache and his mouth tasted like moldy shoe-leather.

“Alan, please. I don't know what to do.”

“Go back to sleep, Denny.” Alan yawned, but squeezed his eyes shut. “It's not even noon.” He didn't know that for sure, of course; his bones told him it could not possibly yet be afternoon. He was excellent in the afternoons.

“Alan--”

“Denny, please. Just lie back down, come spoon me and make those piggy noises I love.” Alan made his best sleepy imitation of Denny's snore. “It will wait, whatever it is.”

“Alan, for fuck's sake! _Wake up and see what's on the screen._"

Alan ran a fist across his eyes and blinked them open, sticky with sleep. He sat up and rubbed his eyes again. They appeared to be in a hotel room; a rather nice one, but then he wouldn't expect any different. A television droned on at the foot of the bed. While Denny loved his tablet, he had kept up the old habit of turning on the television first thing in the morning to see if he was in the news. 

There was a little hotel dining table for two rolled up in the middle of the room, the remains of a bottle and two plates still on it. The long, patterned velvet curtains in that carefully neutral hotel beige were drawn, but sunlight filtered through their cracks. Alan didn't remember getting a hotel room. 

“_...Mayoral candidate Denny Crane has soared in the polls since last night's events. Here's Evelyn on the street._” The screen cut to a microphone being shoved into the face of a young man, grinning ear to ear under an enormous woolly hat. “_Yeah, he's got my vote. That man's speaking the truth. The only politician I've heard this year that's not pussyfootin' around what's happening in America today. I didn't even care about the mayoral race before that debate._”

“Alan!” Denny cried, his puffy face distorted in confusion and anger. “Did I go to a primary debate last night?”

“I... I don't remember.” Alan squeezed his eyes together. Even the meager light hurt his eyes. When would he remember to hydrate properly after drinking? He remembered dinner at Shirley and Carl's. That was... just a day before the primary debate. She'd been pushing, and they'd decided to leave early... 

“_The remarks made by candidate Denny Crane have been called ‘inflammatory’ by commentators, but the public seems to have responded well to Mr Crane's message. And now over to you, Sandy, on the latest report on the destruction wrought on our planet by climate change._"

“_It's called the weather report,_ Greta.”

“_Hah. My name is Ken but trust me, any comparison to Thunberg is an honor. Maybe we could all be a bit more like Denny Crane, hmm?”_

“Rewind it!” Denny shoved the remote into Alan's hands. When panicked, he had a tendency to forget how to use technology. “I need to find out what I said!" 

“Denny, calm down.” His head still hurt, but he swung his legs off the side of the bed. His feet sank into a plush carpet. He needed to relieve himsef, too. What a way to wake up. Instead of bothering to rewind, he picked up his phone from the nightstand and flicked through the messages. There was screaming, mostly, and a line of only question marks from Katie, followed by a second message with even more question marks. No answers. YouTube. They needed YouTube. With Denny hanging anxiously over his shoulder, he played the top video found when searching for ‘Denny Crane primaries debate'. 

“_It is a scam, of course it is,_" said Denny on the screen. The text below declared this was in answer to a question about Trump. Denny was in the same suit he had worn to Shirley's, its collar a little rumpled, his eyes a little glossy. But Denny was good at acting sober when in his cups, he always had been. He just spoke a little more slowly, a little more loudly--and what could be more appropriate for a debate? “_Are you kidding me? You know how he gets away with it? Balls. Balls the size of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. And you know why we let him get away with it? Money. That's all there is to it. The Oval Office hasn't got any power, not really. Money does. America doesn't have a separation of powers, are you kidding me? There's the legislative, executive and judicial branches, sure, but what do they all run on? Money. It's about how much you can get and from whom and how quickly. That's what everybody's after. That's why they call it the bottom line. That's what's made America great!_"

“Well, that's true!” Denny said, frowning. 

“Denny, I think they think you're being sarcastic." 

A text flashed across the screen in a comedic font: ‘This is a REPUBLICAN’, followed by an emoji of a laughing poop. 

Alan switched to Google and ran an image search. More one-liners, one severe white-on-black square of text listing Denny's previous lawsuits, his photo from Crane, Poole & Schmidt's website photoshopped with a crying Pepe-frog at his feet. Alan showed up too, holding hands with Denny outside the courtroom. 

“So,” Alan said after Denny had grabbed the phone from him and kept trying to scroll but just opening the same image up over and over. “What do you want to do?" 

“I don't know! They love me!" He looked up from the phone with a hopeful expression. “I bet this kind of traction gets you a lot of ass.” 

“Denny, remember our conversation about hashtag Me Too?” 

Denny waved a hand dismissively. Alan left him with his phone and went to powder his nose in the bathroom. The mirror confronted him with a sight he still hadn't got used to. “You're getting old,” he mumbled to himself, before picking up a fresh razor to shave off his gray whiskers. Whatever else their last night's selves had done, they'd somehow managed to lay out morning toiletries, just like at home. 

How could he not remember? He washed his face a third time and wiped it on the softest, whitest towel he'd ever been encountered with. 

White. The spotless turned collar of Shirley's shirt underneath that neat suit top. He had wondered why she'd dress for an intimate dinner like she was going to a... political debate. Alan seemed to remember the flash of passing streetlights. Would Shirley Schmidt slip a date-rape drug to Denny to get him to agree to be mayor? 

No, no, she wouldn't. She'd just get him drunk and drive him there. Denny would do the rest himself. 

She might slip Alan one, though. One she'd double-checked was safe and wouldn't hurt him in the long run. Shirley was nothing if not fastidious. And she thought of everything, didn't she? If Denny divided the Republicans, her party would win the post. If Denny somehow worked a miracle, she had a mayor of Boston who would bend, hell, even break any law just to hear her whisper his name. 

It was vicious, ruthless, and frankly a little impressive. Good old Shirley. Alan just couldn't stay mad at her. Even if she _did_ leave them for Carl Sack. 

Alan wrapped himself in a dressing gown—the good hotels always did have dressing gowns as well instead of just those awful bulky bathrobes that got less comfortable the more one's belly expanded over the years—and meandered back, through the small salon room with its Gilded Age fireplace and replica 18th century chairs, into the bedroom. Denny was still scrolling on the phone. Alan picked up the hotel landline and ordered a pot of strong coffee, a jug of spring water and some plain bread. Best not toy with his stomach on a mix of unknown drugs and alcohol. 

“Denny.” He sat back down on the bed next to his husband and gently put his hand over his, recovering his phone and turning it off mid-Fox News. "I wish we had more time to process this, but we have to leave this hotel eventually. So let's agree on a game plan. What do you think? Do you want to roll with it?” 

“And be the first gay liberal Republican mayor of Boston?” Denny's gaze had turned inwards. He was considering it now, Alan could tell. One thing Denny never could resist was the adoration of the masses. 

“Just promise me one thing?” Alan said after a while. 

“What?” 

“_Do not_ go for the presidency.”

A gleam awoke in Denny's eye and that deceptive, gently impish smile lit his lips. That smile meant he was having fun; and Denny having fun meant trouble. “No promises.” 

He wouldn’t, Alan told himself. He couldn’t. No Republican majority could cast itself behind a same-sex couple. No Democratic majority would vote for a Republican—let alone one with Denny’s record. Surely? 

Surely… 

The potential future First Gentleman of the United States sighed, leaned in, and kissed his husband square on the lips. It was a chaste, dry kiss. 

Denny’s smile did not waver. “What was that for?” 

“Practice. We have to get this just right for the cameras now. Trust me, I have no plans of becoming a sad Melania meme.” 

Denny grabbed Alan’s face and planted a rough, wet smacker on him in reply. “Let that be the last time you make that comparison. _You_ of all people.” 

Alan grinned. “No promises.” 

To hell or high water. That was what marriage meant. 


End file.
